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Why local newspapers will still be around a generation from now

Harold Evans began his career as a weekly newspaper reporter and went on to become editor of The Sunday Times for 14 years. He has written five books on editing and design and has been honoured by the British press with a Gold Award for Lifetime Achievement. Here, in an article to mark Local Newspaper Week, which began yesterday, he argues that cyberspace is still no match for a good local paper.



As Yogi Berra said, it is tough to make predictions, especially about the future. Here’s one: that people will still be turning to their local newspapers a generation from now.

One of my dot.com friends was talking the other day about the forthcoming demise of what he called the Dead Tree Daily.

When he was halfway through a discourse on how one could get through to the grass roots by keying in on a chatroom, I stopped him. I am as keen on the computer as the next nerd, but if he changed the nomenclature a bit, I suggested, he was describing a few of the functions provided efficiently, cheaply and reliably by a good local newspaper rooted in its community. It listens to what people have to say and gives them a platform. And it does more than collect chitchat.

A good local newspaper will do something cyberspace, being basically a cheerful anarchy, cannot easily or convincingly originate. It can deploy reporters and photographers to investigate things affecting the community that people in control, in business, trade union, and government in all its forms, would prefer concealed.

A wisely-led local newspaper, moreover, can lend its own authority and promotional powers to campaign for action from the inert, honesty from the dissemblers, revelation from the suppressors. Its credibility is enhanced by the fact that it lives in the real world and is prepared to defend itself against terrestrial prosecutions for defamation, confidence and contempt.

As I write, Press Gazette arrives serendipitously in New York with the news that my old paper, The Northern Echo, has won a High Court campaign that is of benefit to the whole community. It sought and won the permission of the Bishop Auckland Youth Court in County Durham to name a boy of 15, while suppressing his address, because he a recidivist, convicted over and over again of burglary, stealing cars, intimidating witnesses, assaulting a policeman and attempted robbery. The boy’s solicitor appealed, but the High Court upheld the magistrates, and The Northern Echo. The public’s right to be protected from harm, it ruled, outweighed a gang leader’s right to anonymity.

It was remarkable in this case that The Northern Echo’s crime correspondent was allowed to address the magistrates to argue for identification. He was, they acknowledged, speaking for the local community.

If less dramatically, the good local newspaper does that every week – and lets the community speak for itself. In this regard, it is superior to the big guns of Fleet Street. It seeks sensation for the sake of circulation only at its peril. It has to live in the community and cherish it.

I will never forget the greengrocers who arrived angrily in my office in Darlington when we unfavourably compared their produce and prices with the greengroceries in Newcastle. It was a salutary experience: only publish what you are prepared to defend and justify to the offended, and if wrong be ready to make amends at once.

The local newspaper is obviously central to the business life of a community (and will protect itself by electronic enterprise). But it also reflects and enhances the decent values of the community. It does not recklessly intrude. It will feature and encourage the strivers as well as the achievers. It is interested in the happy commonplace. It has a sense of proportion. When we pick up a good local newspaper anywhere, we can say, “So this is how it is here.”

It is regrettable that the appreciation of what the local newspaper represents has not galvanised the clerks in Whitehall. I believe Tony Blair meant it when he proclaimed there would be a new era of open government, but the drafters of new legislation, by clumsiness or cunning, have got hold of the wrong end of the stick. They have Bills that, for all the rhetoric, would enable local government bodies to present their public with fait accompli, with decisions made in secret and without advance provision of agenda papers.

Local newspaper editors are right to argue back, and their public, whom they serve so loyally, would do well to support them in Local Newspaper Week with a little old-fashioned letter writing. Email if you like.


Local Newspaper Week is organised by the Newspaper Society. To visit its website, click here

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